A day before Hari Raya Aidifitri 1431, I receive a message from a fellow amateur radio operator in my Yahoo Messenger client (I use Pidgin). The message was seemingly genuine from him asking if I’m receiving his message, after answering his questions, he proceeds to ask me to wait for a moment ask he wants me to try something. It turns out that he asks me to visit an online quiz website.

The exchange seems almost fluid and being done by a human being, except that my friend and I never had conversation in English! This seems all too fishy when he didn’t response to my conclusion that his computer is infected by a malware/virus. Here are the screenshot of the exchange, (warning: the transcripts contain expletives)

Beware, these kind of viruses can compromise the security of your computer and may be used to harvest your password and other personal information for criminal intent. A seemingly innocent Online Quiz website may be used by phishers in order to commit fraudulent activity.

Verify whether it is really your friend is communicating with you and not somebody else or a program pretending to be him/her, and most importantly do not fell victim to Yahoo Messenger viruses, the result can be devastating.

I was searching for some information when I encountered these warning from Google. Apparently our SIRIM website security has been compromised and was spreading malwares to viewers around the world. Upon closer inspection, SIRIM seems to have taken down its website as of May 30,2008.

Probably SIRIM should perform a thorough checking on its website before publishing it to the internet, there must be a “Standard” for website security I assume?

Some of my friends were wondering why I did not log in my Friendster account for a long period of time considering that I worked in front of a PC all the time.

Well, I leave it up to these screenshots to answer those questions

FYI, most of these people have at least completed college-level education and are supposed to understand that forwading junk messages could disrupt any sort of communication network.

Oh well I might as well redirect people who questioned my long absence from Friendster account to this page next time. Boohoo social networking, I’ll be screening my FaceBook contact to avoid this sort of problem.